Thanks to the work of Erik Veenstra and Qemu-Puppy, Bogdan Radulescu and his unbelievable NimbleX Linux distro, and all the folks at pendrivelinux.com, I now have a functional, VM USB running the latest Pizzapup 3.0 with that delicious theme and Beagle bark, FF updated w/ Privoxy/Tor, Sound Blaster Audigy, and, get this, no hassle Wi-Fi connection. Tested on one desktop and one laptop w/ Wi-Fi. Certainly not scientific, but it can be done in less than three hours.

What does this mean? It means I can go to--I trust the Process--any computer public or private, pop in an Apacer (it's the most I could afford--teachers don't make THAT much) 1GB USB, click on a my Puppy batch file and whoa! It's all there--everything saved just as it was--yes, finally, a portable virtual machine. Different sound card? No problem--it just works because of Qemu and the batch file. More acceleration? KQemu will start automatically if allowed by the host machine.

Add Fasterfox by Tony, AdBlock Plus, and some mp3's--it's golden.

Definitely not the New Wave of Linux--but it was fun pulling all the pieces together.

I think I'll take my new Puppy for a walk on this beautiful spring day.

You could call it... Pupporoni! I want this. Of course, I can't even get QemuPuppy to work and it's killing me. I've been going crazy for a week just trying to get that to work, but maybe it's my bios not letting me. It starts to boot, but ALWAYS stops at "Cannot find puppy on '[whatever I happen to try for the PMedia value]' or 'idehd' if I happen to leave out Pmedia altogether. Puppy itself boots fine without trouble when installed to the Mobilemate USB drive using the Universal Installer from the Puppy CD.

Okay, I finally, after about a week, figured out the exact right combination to get QemuPuppy working, for me anyway. I'm posting it here to help others with similar problems. I formatted the Mobilemate 1GB usb flash drive using the HP flash utility that I found in a link somewhere (it's talked about often on forums) and formatted the USB drive using the dos boot disk option (this may not have been necessary, but since it worked, I see all these steps as something I personally intend to repeat; you'll need dos boot files from windows 98 or earlier to do this). While in windows, I deleted those dos files from the usb disk and extracted the qemupuppy archive's files onto it. I then got in the command prompt (start menu->run->cmd)changed to the USB drive (cd g:), then " syslinux -f g: ". The "-f" may not have been necessary, but I figured it couldn't hurt. It stands for "force" I believe (I don't know exactly what it does). Then I edited the syslinux.cfg file to look like this:

Then I rebooted, entered the bios, made sure that the detected usb drive took priority over the hard disk as the boot device. I think it was "hard disk options" that I was into, but every bios differs, so whatever works for yours. I saved the changes, let the computer boot up. It, for the first time after probably 50 bad tries using various other bad combinations of formatting/syslinux.cfg edits, booted , without complaint or reluctance into the fast os we all know and love. I'm so happy, I don't even care that I've pulled all my hair out. :lol: I think I should get drunk now.

In case the reader is having problems getting qemupuppy to boot in qemu mode, that would be an entirely different problem. I never had a problem with that.

You could call it... Pupporoni! I want this. Of course, I can't even get QemuPuppy to work and it's killing me. I've been going crazy for a week just trying to get that to work, but maybe it's my bios not letting me. It starts to boot, but ALWAYS stops at "Cannot find puppy on '[whatever I happen to try for the PMedia value]' or 'idehd' if I happen to leave out Pmedia altogether. Puppy itself boots fine without trouble when installed to the Mobilemate USB drive using the Universal Installer from the Puppy CD.

I've had the same exact problem with Qemu-Puppy, also, and it didn't matter if it was an LG 1G pdrive or SanDisk Micro 512M or SanDisk Freedom 256M or.........

I'm glad you have it working, Turpin......I'll give it a go and see if I have any luck with Qemu-Puppy......

Sweet! I'm hooked on QemuPizzaPup now. The portability! With these powers, I could.... Absolutely beautiful piece of work. I don't know how you did it, but it works like magic. Thanks Jasray

Sorry to hear that, theGeekster. I was so near giving up so many times. It requires a willingness to enter into new levels of insanity sometimes to keep going on it, and I seem to have that going for me. I read that some bioses are simply stubborn and won't let you boot from usb. I would recommend first trying to boot plain old puppy from usb (use the universal installer from the Puppy CD that you create from the ISO or buy from the creators of Puppy). If you can get THAT to boot, there MAY be hope. If that boots, don't assume that the way Puppy partitioned your usb drive is going to work for QemuPuppy (don't assume it won't either). Most likely, you'll get it working by partitioning with Windows fat32 format or HP Partitioning tool. If you're trying it formatted with Windows standard fat32 formatting, try leaving the syslinux.cfg at its default. If with the HP tool, do what I did to get it to work (a couple posts up). Beyond that, try different combinations, look carefully at the bios settings that have anything to do with booting devices, try different values for PMEDIA in syslinux.cfg. They can be PMEDIA= usbflash|usbhd|usbcd|ideflash|idehd|idecd|idezip|satahd|scsihd|scsicd
and don't forget to read all of the official QemuPuppy instructions on its home page, especially that part about syslinux [drive letter]: which is done from windows command prompt. Good luck
Also, you might want to ask Jasray about his little innovation. It works a little differently on booting. It might work for you even if Qemupuppy doesn't. It's the coolest thing... Words fail.
I should note, I haven't succesfully booted QemuPizzaPup except in Windows qemu so far, so I'm kind of back to the old "try evrything" again myself. When will motherboard manufacturers catch on that people want to boot from usb?

Actually, Jasray, does QemuPizzaPup work for booting the computer? I had assumed it did, maybe too quickly. Come to think of it, I don't fully understand the process the computer goes through at boot time, though I should, considering I have an A+ certification.

I don't know if I should be answering my own question about someone else's work. I just dont want people to get confused. Apparently, Jasray's QemuPizzaPup doesn't boot the real hardware. But, if all you're wanting is something that will boot in qemu mode on a windows machine (and maybe linux, but I haven't tried it), it's definitely the coolest thing. I also don't know if he wanted to make this thing official or just offer it to a few people. Basically, like he said, it's something that someone who knows what they're doing can figure out in a few hours. He just knows what he's doing more than I do.

Is there any way to do what QemuPuppy does (allowing one to boot Puppy in Linux, Windows or the actual hardware, while preserving and updating settings, bookmarks, and documents) while also allowing one to have sound when booting in qemu-mode in Windows? Has anyone gotten sound to work in Qemu-Puppy in Windows? I mean besides Qemu-Pizzapup, which, cool as it is, can't boot the hardware? Or, alternatively, would there be a way to modify even QemuPizzapup, which has sound in Windows, to be able to boot the hardware while maintaining all my settings, bookmarks, etc.?

If someone could tell me this isn't currently possible, at least I can quit trying.

I even was about to fall back to using the Puppy liveCD in Virtualbox, but that doesn't let it write back to itself multisession. I also can't get Puppy in Virtualbox to see my USB flash drive even though it seems to be active in Virtualbox. Any other method I can think of for storing data from puppy (besides CD/DVD or USB thumbdrive) in Virtual machine mode wouldn't be portable.

I'm trying to get puppylinux to boot from a 1Gb pendrive, and couldn't get my pendrive to boot, despite setting up the bios OK.
I've given up trying to find my way from qemu, which runs happily in win2k into puppy, which I can't get to run in qemu/virtualbox/or even virtualPC, So I just want portable puppy......
Following along the lines of Turpin's post dated 16 may, I, too, downloaded the [Huge] HP usb boot utility, and modified the syslinux.cfg file
"#hpdkbu
default flash
prompt 1
timeout 30
say HP Firmware Maintenance (press F1 for extended boot options)
say Copyright 2001, 2004 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
display help.msg
F1 menu.msg
label flash
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz loglevel=3 PMEDIA=usbhdd
timeout 50"

I unzipped puppylinux2.14 to the same pendrive, (which overwrote the HP vmlinuz)

This starts a bootup process which runs:[abbreviated]
boot:
loading vmlinuz
loading initrd.gz
ready
uncompressing linux
bootup messages
now executing 'init' in initial-ramdisk
mount hdds etc, all done down to busybox
then I get
Usage: init
Init is the parent of all processes
Kernel panic - not syncing No init found Try passing init = option to the kernel